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What if the next generation of builders for the social sector isn't waiting in elite campuses.​
What if we find them in small towns, government colleges and places the tech world rarely looks?
What if all they needed was some exposure, trust and someone willing to bet on them?​
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The Tech4Good Fellowship exists to find them.
The Becoming
Tech4Good Fellowship
We look beyond resumes and grades to identify young people with exceptional potential, introduce them to the world of open source technology, and immerse them in the realities of building digital goods for nonprofits, conservationists, educators, public health workers and grassroots organisations.
With the support of the Azim Premji Foundation, we travelled to Yelagiri in Tamil Nadu and met four students who were just finishing college. One young woman and three young men. ​​​They had never imagined careers in social impact.
They had never heard of most of the social impact organisations we worked with. Like thousands of students graduating every year from Tier 2, Tier 3 and rural colleges, they had immense dreams but very little exposure.
We asked them to do something they hadn't planned.
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Pack their bags.
Move to Bengaluru.
Spend a year with us learning a completely different way of thinking about technology and open-source ways.
Together, we spent a year unlearning as much as learning.
They discovered open source communities, learned to build with empathy, embraced collaboration, and found confidence they didn't know they possessed.​​
Today, those four fellows are no longer students.
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They are builders.
They are mentors.
They are master trainers.​
And they are helping shape the future of technology for the this ecosystem.
The Curriculum
The stuff before code
A lot of programmes start with a stack. Python. React. APIs. Frameworks. We start with a more nuanced approach. The first thing a fellow learns is how to sit with a problem long enough to understand it. The fellowship is built around how our own engineering team works: exploring, questioning, breaking things, rebuilding them, and learning from each other along the way.
The aim is to create engineers who can make good decisions when the problem is unclear, the constraints are real, and there isn't a tutorial to follow.
Getting basics right
The first 4 months are about building the foundations that make everything else easier. Fellows work on problem solving, logic, programming fundamentals. They practise through exercises, peer reviews, discussions with our inhouse senior engineers, and regular reflection on their own work.
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The focus is on developing judgement beyond a syllabus.
Moving from exercises to systems
The technology bootcamp is where fellows start working with the kind of problems engineers deal with every day.
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How do you document something clearly enough that someone else can build on it?
How do you design software that is flexible without creating unnecessary complexity?
Fellows learn software design, workflows, documentation, open-source practices, and engineering fundamentals as non-isolated concepts while working through real scenarios.
We work with student incubators and colleges that create pathways into technology for students from non urban regions.
​​The people who join us usually have a few things in common:
They are curious.
They like figuring things out.
They have some computer science foundations.
They don't mind not knowing something yet.
Beyond that, we spend time understanding the person behind the application.
What have they tried?
What keeps them going?
How do they approach learning?
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Are they excited to spend a year working closely with a team, learning from others, and contributing to technology that solves real problems?
We are looking for people with the instincts to become full engineers.
What our fellows discovered along the way
Jency
Jency dreams big, acts first and has an impressive talent for breaking things almost as well as she builds them. She’ll happily dive into unfamiliar code, pull it apart, figure out why it works or why it doesn’t and leave behind better documentation and a very detailed all hands Monday update representing her batch.
Today, Jency leads testing across our products, catching the edge cases everyone else missed that make our software stronger.
And then there’s Jency being Jency: no one asked her to build an AI application builder. She simply wanted to understand where AI was headed and decided the best way to learn was to build one herself.
Shakti
Then there’s Sakthi, the Shifu of the fellowship.
Sakthi is the person our student community goes to when a website is stuck, a layout refuses to behave or a solution needs another pair of eyes. He leads our website building programme - Ghosted, helping students create websites for nonprofits while shaping the way they think about building software.
He learned open source the way it is meant to be learned by getting into the work. The thing about Shifu is that he never just gives the answer. He helps people find a better one. You might want to catch him at one of our events to witness this.
Praveen
Praveen, our football nerd, knows when to make the pass and when to take the shot. He dived into learning Whatomate, an open-source WhatsApp chatbot built by Zerodha, hosted on Idlistack. He took this opportunity and didn’t just stop there. He spent time understanding the technology, building its documentation, testing its possibilities and demo-ing the tool to nonprofits to see where it could solve real communication challenges. He has been the bridge between the tool and the people it hopes to serve, taking something built by the open-source community and finding its place in the social sector.
Prasana
Prasana is a brilliant team player, and has picked up many tech stacks lending his support to the team when help is needed. He started out exploring engineering fundamentals and soon found himself drawn to testing, understanding what makes software reliable, intuitive and useful. Does this make sense for the person using it? is one question we hear from him and Jency often.Together, they remind us that good testing is about caring enough to make things better more than finding faults.
The next chapter
Supported by Mphasis and Acumen, our newest cohort brings six remarkable young women into the Tech4Good Community.​
Finding them wasn't easy. It took nearly sixty interviews to discover six extraordinary stories. Six first jobs. Six families placing their trust in an unfamiliar journey. Six young women choosing possibility over certainty.​ They come from Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, Kamrup in Assam, Jashpur in Chhattisgarh, Hassan in Karnataka, and Kallakurichi and Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu.
Folks backing this effort
Student outreach
